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Other Women

Marybeth was on the pill. She was kind to you. Britt has a great body but she didn't like sex. She got married to someone else almost immediately after you broke up. She kept the cat. Meg has a PhD, in Latin or Greek or something. She's older, and she knows how to dress.Kerry was kind of walled off, emotionally. She broke your heart, and when we finally broke up you gave me a letter that was addressed to her. Heather didn't want to talk about the relationship. She would fidget instead, and not meet your eyes. Angela is gorgeous and she never had any money. Once she left a brand new guitar that you gave her in the back of her unlocked car and it got stolen. She didn't like your house. Jody is creative, jealous, and prone to cleaning obsessively. She read O Magazine, but didn't have other hobbies. You fought like cats and dogs. Christine is a massage therapist with a pet snake.

There are nameless girls, too. The one who you followed to England. The one who snuck into your dorm room that time. The one you were married to, who ran marathons and attempted suicide.

Comments

wow!!! that certainly is a track record of choosing poorly. I don't believe in such long strings of "bad luck." There must be a subtext that you have omitted, but which you asumed that we would infer. I share farber's assumption and agree with the proferred advice.

No, it's not anything like that. I was thinking about what fragments of information I knew and remembered about the previous girlfriend of different men I'd dated. In each case, this was the one who'd come before me. So the "you" is a different person each time. I was thinking about how sometimes I know a lot and sometimes I know a little and sometimes I don't know anything about these women who had preceded me.

I didn't give you any context; there's no reason you would have figured that out. The real context is that I bumped into one of these women -- the one who came before me -- at an event last week. And I talked to her and realized how once upon a time I'd felt like I was in her shadow and now she seemed like she might become a friend. It made me think about how sometimes I've imagined myths about these women and other times I haven't given them any thought at all. So I went through the list trying to think about what I knew about various 'priors'.

I kind of like it without the context...it lets the mind wander and wonder. It also sets the stage for some great fiction writing; the narrator might be unreliable? Interesting. In any case, I love the second-person.

I came here from Bamber's place... and having a colorful past myself, I've learned -- late -- not to tell too many stories. My current wife doesn't need too many names and details; the general picture is plenty for her. Sometimes, men make the mistake of assuming that everyone else finds their personal romantic/sexual narrative intensely interesting -- and painless to listen to.

Earlier comments about the "run of bad luck" are amusing to me... because, assuming one is relatively monogamous, doesn't one only ever have one successful relationship? All others, by definition, would have somehow had something go wrong.